Starts with candy, ends in napalm

by Serge Halimi

Barack Obama once described the operations in Afghanistan as a “necessary war”. That war has lasted eight years and General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the US forces there, appointed by Obama, is urging him to deploy 40,000 more troops.

In Indochina, the US supported corrupt and illegitimate puppet governments, to no avail. In Afghanistan, Britain and the Soviet Union failed to subdue the country, despite all their efforts. US military losses have been relatively small (880 since 2001, compared with 1,200 a month in Vietnam in 1968) and anti-war protests have been low-key, but have the western armies any chance of winning, lost in mountains, surrounded by drug traffickers (1), and suspected of crusading against Islam?

The French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner still hopes to “win hearts and minds with a bullet-proof vest” (2) and McChrystal assures the world that “the American goal in Afghanistan must not be primarily to hunt down and kill Taliban insurgents but to protect the population” (3). Apart from their cynicism, these statements are based on a common assumption that social development can be combined with military operations in a country where it is impossible to distinguish between insurgents and civilians. In Vietnam, the US journalist Andrew Kopkind summed up this kind of “counter-insurgency” in 1966 as “candy in the morning, napalm in the afternoon”.

Washington appreciated the strength of Afghan nationalist and religious forces when, with American aid, they drained the Soviet Union. The US may have no hope of decisively beating them now, but it would like to weaken the loose links between the Taliban and al-Qaida militants (4). After all, Washington’s reason for deploying troops and drones in central Asia following the attacks on 11 September 2001 was to destroy al-Qaida, not to secure an education for Afghan girls.

If Obama, the latest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, resists the neoconservative call for military escalation, he will have to explain to the US public that it is rarely possible to secure happiness by bombing the people; that there are now only a handful of Osama bin Laden’s followers in Afghanistan; and that US security will not be threatened if an understanding is reached with the less extremist wing of the Taliban (see Culture wars in Afghanistan). Russia, China, India and Pakistan have no interest in perpetuating this serious regional tension and might help to arrange a negotiated settlement. To sacrifice a life for “democracy” in a foreign country is a challenge, but to die for Hamid Karzai? And to do so when General McChrystal admits that the “mayor of Kabul”, hanging on to office by electoral fraud, has actually managed to make many Afghans feel “nostalgic for the security and justice Taliban rule provided”.

These questions seem to be of no concern to European leaders, although 31,000 British, German, French, Italian and other European troops are fighting alongside the US forces. Now, more than ever, Nato decisions are taken in Washington. In Paris, President Sarkozy recently announced that France “will not send one soldier more”, and then added: “Is it necessary to stay in Afghanistan? I say yes. And to stay to win” (5). Buried in a two-page interview, his statement attracted no comment, perhaps the kindest response.

(1) Afghanistan accounts for 93% of heroin production worldwide. See Ahmed Rashid, “The Afghanistan Impasse”, New York Review of Books, 8 October 2009. See also the map, “L’opium, principale production afghane”, on the French Monde diplomatique website.